And it is undeniable, that as yet we have had no means of rapid and cheap distribution of goods, whether imports or manufactures, save by this crowding of human beings into great cities, for the more easy despatch of business. Whether we shall devise other means hereafter is a question of which I shall speak presently. Meanwhile, no man is to be blamed for the existence, hardly even for the evils, of great cities. The process of their growth has been very simple. They have gathered themselves round abbeys and castles, for the sake of protection; round courts, for the sake of law; round ports, for the sake of commerce; round coal mines, for the sake of manufacture. Before the existence of railroads, penny-posts, electric telegraphs, men were compelled to be as close as possible to each other, in order to work together. When the population was small, and commerce feeble, the cities grew to no very great size, and the bad effects of this crowding were not felt. The cities of England in the Middle Age were too small to keep their inhabitants week after week, month after month, in one deadly vapour-bath of foul gas; and though the mortality among infants was probably excessive, yet we should have seen among the adult survivors few or none of those stunted and etiolated figures so common now in England, as well as on the Continent. The green fields were close outside the walls, where lads and lasses went a-maying, and children gathered flowers, and sober burghers with their wives took the evening walk; there were the butts, too, close outside, where stalwart prentice-lads ran and wrestled, and pitched the bar, and played backsword, and practised with the long-bow; and sometimes, in stormy times, turned out for a few months as ready-trained soldiers, and, like Ulysses of old, Drank delight of battle with their peers, and then returned again to the workshop and the loom. The very mayor and alderman went forth, at five o’clock on the summer’s morning, with hawk and leaping-pole, after a duck and heron; or hunted the hare in state, probably in the full glory of furred gown and gold chain; and then returned to breakfast, and doubtless transacted their day’s business all the better for their morning’s gallop on the breezy downs. But there was another side to this genial and healthy picture. A hint that this was a state of society which had its conditions, its limit; and if those were infringed, woe alike to burgher and to prentice. Every now and then epidemic disease entered the jolly city—and then down went strong and weak, rich and poor, before the invisible and seemingly supernatural arrows of that angel of death whom they had been pampering unwittingly in every bedroom.